From ancient ruins in Rome to rugged Alpine peaks – “Longing – Artists on the Road”, the new exhibition at Albertina Vienna, reveals how travelling shaped artists’ perspectives from the 18th century onwards. Drawings and watercolours bring the desire for distant horizons to life.
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From May 7 to October 12, 2025, ALBERTINA MODERN is showcasing Damien Hirst – Drawings, the first comprehensive exhibition of the British artist’s works on paper. A total of 138 pieces are on display, including 120 drawings that offer rare insights into Hirst’s creative process. The show is further enriched by selected sculptures and an interactive drawing machine.
The ALBERTINA dedicates Austria’s first solo exhibition to Jenny Saville, one of the most successful contemporary artists. The British artist, born in 1970, is considered one of the Young British Artists (YBAs), alongside Tracy Emin and Damien Hirst.
Erwin Wurm (*1954, Bruck an der Mur) is one of the most influential contemporary artists of our time. To mark his 70th birthday, ALBERTINA MODERN is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to his work. The exhibition features sculptures, drawings, photographs, and videos that highlight the paradoxes and absurdities of our world.
The ALBERTINA Museum is showing the highlights of its large holdings of works by Jim Dine – a representative selection of the artist’s generous donation that presents his oeuvre in a multifaceted way.
The great draughtsman Alfred Kubin shows us the world in the clutches of evil. The exhibition at the ALBERTINA MODERN presents Kubin’s early creative phase from 1899 to 1904 from the ALBERTINA’s collection of around 1800 drawings. 100 works visualise his dark world, in which evil, the frightening and the gruesome prevail.
The Beauty of Diversity moves in the field of tension between an established understanding of art and its renewal. The exhibition unfolds its persuasive power in the juxtaposition of renowned artists who have always wanted to strain the canon and yet have become canonised, and new discoveries as well as those who irritate viewing habits, swim against the tide, shake the foundations of high culture, break the norm and thus establish the aesthetics of diversity.
On the occasion of Gottfried Helnwein’s 75th birthday, the ALBERTINA presents a comprehensive exhibition of his works from the last three decades. In each of his paintings, Helnwein, the artist born in Vienna in 1948, raises an indictment against cruelty and ruthlessness as well as the horrors of fascism.
The master of the Renaissance: Michelangelo is one of that handful of artists whose fame has remained unbroken for centuries. Although his art and ideals are deeply rooted in the thinking of his time – the heyday of the Renaissance and the advancing 16th century – the impact of his art extends to the present day.
This presentation is dedicated to Georg Baselitz (*1938) and his generous decision to donate 100 of his own outstanding and pioneering works on paper to the ALBERTINA Museum and the Morgan Library, from which he invited the two museums to choose 50 each for their collections.
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of his death, the ALBERTINA commemorates Pablo Picasso – the greatest and most influential artist of the 20th century: a trailblazer for the first half of the century with Cubism, a major representative of Symbolism with his Blue Period, the pioneer of Classicism in the 1920s, and the ideal for the Neo-Expressionist movements of the 1980s with his late work. His oeuvre of approximately 50,000 works reflects the vast political changes and fast-moving avant-garde movements of his era from the turn of the century to the early 1970s.